Liberties; The Alpha-Beta Macarena

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: November 3, 1999

WASHINGTON—
I will say this in Naomi Wolf's favor: You've got to respect a woman who gets a vice president to pay her a salary higher than his own.

Time magazine revealed that Al Gore hired Ms. Wolf, who has written extensively on women and sexual power, as a $15,000-a-month consultant to help him with everything from his shift to earth tones to his efforts to break with Bill Clinton.

''Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a 'beta male' who needs to take on the 'alpha male' in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog,'' write Time's Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty.

Of course, when a man has to pony up a fortune to a woman to teach him how to be a man, that definitely takes the edge off his top-dogginess.

Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic. It is advice given to all vice presidents: Be your own guy.

''It's baby biology, for heaven's sake,'' says Lionel Tiger, the anthropologist and author of ''The Decline of Males.'' ''In two months the vice president has paid Naomi Wolf the annual salary of an assistant professor of zoology at a decent university to tell him something so elementary.

''If Gore actually was a dominant male, he wouldn't need to be told how to have gusto.''

The deliberate Mr. Gore had seven years to get his team together, and yet his pack of gurus becomes ever wackier, like the portal to John Malkovich's head.

Imagine the scene when the earthy campaign manager, Donna Brazile, learned that the airy Naomi was receiving consulting fees that could have totaled $180,000 for a year, compared with the vice president's annual salary of $175,400. Ms. Brazile cut Ms. Wolf's fee down to $5,000 a month.

The 37-year-old Ms. Wolf, who was a Rhodes scholar, wrote ''The Beauty Myth,'' a 1991 book about how the obsession with looks was a conspiracy perpetrated by the beauty industry. ''She came onto the stage all glossy-eyed and glossy-mouthed, telling all the ugly girls that it didn't matter if Prince Charming wasn't attracted to them,'' Mr. Tiger says. ''But beauty is a real force, not a myth. And it's cruel to say otherwise.''

She alarmed critics by drawing parallels between the Holocaust and anorexia.

In her next book, ''Fire With Fire,'' she drew a parallel between apartheid and the gender wars and urged women to release their inner sluts.

Her thesis was that feminism needed to be more fun: ''Rape, of course, must never be thought of as fun. But should it be heresy to suggest that changing attitudes about rape should sometimes be fun? This must not be taken out of context, but there is no other way to say it: The rape crisis center starved for lack of fun.''

Now Ms. Wolf has to make the unfun Gore fun. She has come up with her most un-feminist notion yet: Urge a gentle, new-age beta male to act like a Fight Club macho alpha male, the sort who bares his teeth and drags women off to his cave.

She has a point. Women are impressed by swagger and paternalism in presidential candidates, just as men are.

In 1996 Ms. Wolf helped Dick Morris woo straying female voters back to the Clinton fold. Mr. Morris, the master of alternating smart and flaky ideas, said that Ms. Wolf had alternating smart and flaky ideas. ''Once she showed up at my office with a whole wall full of angel cutouts from Time magazine and other places, saying angels were in the United States,'' he said on Fox News. ''And I said, 'What are we supposed to do, y'know, appoint one to the cabinet?' ''

She devised the Good Father model for Bill Clinton. It was an obvious idea. But we live in a time when politicians don't trust the contents of their own minds, when externalities are more important than internalities.

And the style consultants can't even agree about the externalities. In the '96 race, Harry Thomasson told Mr. Clinton to wear lighter suits. Then Mr. Morris told Mr. Clinton not to. Now Ms. Wolf approves of Mr. Gore's switch from navy to tan.

It's deliciously Byzantine. Mr. Gore, whose shot at the presidency is in jeopardy because Mr. Clinton had a preoccupation with sex, has turned to an author with a preoccupation with sex to save him.

And now, after turning Mr. Clinton, the predator, into the Good Father, Ms. Wolf will try to turn Mr. Gore, a good father, into more of a predator.